AS Terry Butcher's frustration continues with the lack of supporters turning up to Inverness games, Gordon Waddell wonders if the club could do more to encourage fans to matches.

YOUR heart goes out to Terry Butcher. There is nothing more he can do.

His team are scoring goals. Bucketloads of them. Playing with panache. They’re contesting second place in the SPL. Bang in the mix to bring European football to the Highlands for the first time.

He is maxed out. Yet he’s still having to goad the people of Europe’s fastest growing city into supporting them? To get more than 2500 of them to turn up for a home game? No wonder he’s frustrated.

But before he alienates himself completely with the whole “Do they deserve us?”petted lip, maybe he needs to have a look around him.

Ask himself what more his club can be doing rather than his team. Ask himself what more the game can be doing with the product.

Then he might start getting to the root of the problem. Because the thing you can’t do is blame people for not turning up just because they live there.

He got hit by the perfect storm the other night, to be fair. Of all the excuses people will give you for not going to a game, the top three of them were available for use on Wednesday.

Real Madrid v Man Utd was live on the box. The weather was baltic. And Inverness were charging like the light brigade at the gate – £26 for the main stand, £21 for behind the goal.

But their biggest issue is the same one most clubs in Scotland have. They do nothing to earn their support other than simply existing.

They take it for granted that they have a right to your loyalty based on nothing more than geography. Factor in the latent Old Firm support in every community, then expect everyone who’s left to be yours by default.

But what do they ever do to make the punters feel like it’s THEIR club? Make them feel they’re invested in it?

Football clubs should be the beating heart of their communities.

They should have liaisons with every school, a shop in their town centre, be letting every kid in for nothing and filling as many seats as they can every week. And they need to keep doing it, season after season.

Do what Stenhousemuir do. Give them a loyalty card and reward them every few games.

A scarf, a T-shirt, whatever. Play the long game. Loyalty isn’t an overnighter. It has to be built over years, generations.

Don’t forget Caley Thistle are less than 20 years old and they’ve done superbly to get to where they are.

But their directors have done what every other club’s directors have done. Assume people will come rather than give them an incentive to come.

And no matter how good the team on the park are, there has to be more. People have to feel engaged.

It’s also too easy to say: “It’s too expensive to get into football, drop the prices and people will come.”

It doesn’t work. Not as a stand-alone policy, anyway.

I went to Falkirk v Cowdenbeath a few weeks ago and they’d dropped the price to a tenner from £18 because they knew it wasn’t exactly one to get the juices flowing.

Yet they got 35 fewer than they had against Hamilton two weeks previous. They lost dough.

Ask Motherwell, ask Killie. They’ve tried every trick in the book and it’s barely put a blip in the graph.

Yes, football’s price-sensitive, sure, but only when the game means something.

The all-round product – and hate the word or not, that’s what it is – has to be better.

We still have no idea what we’re buying for a season that’s supposed to start in five months.

There’s no sponsor, no structure, no direction and a growing number of dissenting voices for what’s on the table.

It’s not just Inverness’ problem – it’s the game’s problem.

And everyone needs to start understanding what it is their customers are going to buy into before they all vanish for good.